“I saw the car,” she said. “In the drive.”

I waited.

“It’s kind of cute,” she said.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it should do us. Although I looked all around it and couldn’t find the outlet where you plug it in.”

“That joke’s really running out of gas.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Sarah said. “I have to say, it’s perfect for Angie getting back and forth to school.”

“Paul hates it,” I said.

Sarah shrugged. You reach a point when you stop worrying about what your teenagers hate.

I called Paul to dinner, setting out three plates, and making up a fourth and covering it with plastic wrap for Angie to eat later. I stood and ate by the sink, Paul grabbed his plate and went to the basement, leaving Sarah the only one to actually sit at the kitchen table to eat her meal. But because she had to be ready to leave in a little more than an hour, she shoveled it down like a teenager.

“Guess who was prowling around the backyard when I got home,” I said.

Sarah glanced over, one cheek puffed out with pork tenderloin. “Urmff?” she said.

“Trevor Wylie.”

“Hmmff?”

“That’s right.” I filled her in on the conversation Lawrence and I had had with the boy. The dog named Morpheus. The satellite program, the six-pack in the backyard.

Sarah drank some water to clear all the food from her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “He does sound a bit weird, but lots of kids are like that, they grow out of it. He’s probably harmless.”

“You should meet him yourself.”

“Remember when you were first interested in me, and I lived out on Highway 74, and you came around one night, planning to call up to my window, but when you climbed the fence, you snagged your pants—”

“I know the story.”

“—you snagged your pants as you were coming over the other side, and you kept going but your pants got left behind?”

“I don’t see—”

“And my dad heard the racket and went out to investigate, and there you were in your Jockeys?”

I suffered a moment with the memory, then said, “The difference is, you were interested in me, but Angie’s not interested in Trevor.”

“Actually, at the time, I wasn’t interested in you.”

“You weren’t?”

“Not really. But you kind of grew on me. And it took a lot of convincing for my dad to accept a guy he’d first found standing in our backyard in his skivvies.”

“I think you have some of the details wrong. I was wearing a tuck-in shirt that had long tails front and back, so you could hardly even see my shorts.”

Sarah nodded. “I think you’re right. You were the picture of dignity.”

“So you’re saying finding Trevor in our backyard isn’t that big a deal?”

“Did he have his pants on?”

“Yes.”